Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to computer security, more particularly, to a more secure and user friendly CAPTCHA.
Related Art
Online transactions are becoming more and more prevalent, with an ever-increasing number of online entities that may or may not have a physical real world counterpart. Furthermore, the services offered by these online entities have been improving as well. The popularity of online transactions is partially attributable to the ease and convenience of making a transaction online instead of at a physical location. As more and more transactions are done online, fraud prevention becomes critical. Among other methods, one method of detecting potential fraud is to check to see if a user is really a human being or a machine. This type of detection is known as CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
A conventional CAPTCHA may involve displaying obfuscated words or letters and asking a user to enter the displayed words or letters. Obfuscation of the words or letters is presumed to make the words or letters unrecognizable to a machine, while a human should be able to correctly identify the words or letters with relative ease. However, rapid advances in computer technology has made computers much more capable of solving CAPTCHAs, which means conventional CAPTCHAs may not offer as much reliability as they once did. In addition, traditional CAPTCHAs may be difficult for humans to correctly identify as well, particularly if the display is on a small screen such as a mobile telephone screen. Consequently, a human user could be erroneously classified as a machine, which defeats the purpose of the CAPTCHA.
Therefore, while existing CAPTCHAs have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in every aspect. It would be advantageous to offer an improve CAPTCHA that is both easy for humans to identify and hard for machines to solve.